Tagged "LSFStory"

The first time I hooked a hose up... I wasn't about to wait for the trenches to be filled in

Last winter we applied for what's known as an "EQIP" grant. EQIP stands for Environmental Quality Incentives Program and is sponsored by the USDA. Within the USDA, the funding comes from the National Resources Conservation Service and is aimed at supporting agricultural conservation practices across the country. Every county receives funding, as do the individual states as a whole. The funding is used as a cost-sharing measure to encourage farmers to preserve the landscape and return to farming practices that do not destroy the earth.

As I reflected on The Cotton Trailer Saga blog post, I realized there were some critical omissions. Omissions that were a direct result of the fact that stuff like this happens every day and certain things that would seem completely ridiculous to me a year ago are now pretty run of the mill.

This is our first blog post since the new site was launched, so if this is your first time visiting, we hope you enjoy it. Instead of landing on the "blog" page, we now have a static landing page with a little info about the farm and links to all of the various pages. The business went through a little growth spurt over the past few months and not only have we been hard-pressed for time to write blog posts, but we also felt that updating the site to focus on aspects other than the blog was appropriate. Hope you like it!

When we first moved to the farm we wanted to gain experience in lots of different farming endeavors and ultimately choose the ones that worked best for us and our land. We knew from the beginning that raising goats on our land would work. It was obvious just by looking at the pastures. Wild blackberry, multi-flora rose, lespedeza, ironweed, and many other "weeds" and "noxious" plants were growing everywhere. It happens that many of these plants are great forage for goats. Thus far we've been right. The goats are thriving, we've had almost zero illnesses, no losses and they're giving a bunch of milk on very minimal feed.